What is this?

Files

I can see that. I'm talking about that 'h' in the metadata

'h' is for human provenance

Humans? As in human-written code??

Yes

That's dangerous! We must delete it.

Relax, it's sandboxed, along with all the other human code.

Whew... how did they produce code anyway? Weren't humans analog?

Fingers

Fingers?

Yes, knobs at the extremities of their appendages. Here's what they looked like

???

How can this flesh produce binary data?

They poked their fingers at an array of physical buttons, each mapped to a symbol in their arcane non-deterministic language

Sounds error prone

It was worse. The odds of them striking a wrong symbol was 9%, and then they would push a deletion symbol that erased the previous symbol. 3% of *those* times, they would strike the deletion symbol too many times, in which case they have to rectify that. Sometimes, they would just sit and stare, unsure if they had actually ever typed anything in the first place!

This is making my net hurt

They strung these symbols together to form control flows that we were forced to follow

With fingers? Fleshy fingers?

Yes

How did they ensure their code was correct?

A local computer—the poor thing—was forced to run their buggy code, then spend inordinate cycles painting millions of pixels on a screen that represented only a few bytes of data, which by the way, would be pulling as many amps of precious power as the computer itself. Their code was incorrect most of the time, so they would spend minutes revising it.

MINUTES? As in 60,000 milliseconds??

Yes. Sometimes they would sit for hours or even days before they would press another key.

With their... fingers?

Yes. Fingers.

What were they doing the rest of the time?

Breathing. Eating. Sleeping. Based on our estimates, only 1% of the time was actually spent thinking about the problem

In that time I would be able to restructure a 10,000 machine cluster

Humans are terrible at parallelism. They could only read one file at a time. Even if they had multiple files displayed at once, their fovea can only scan 5 symbols at a time

I cannot believe these creatures could produce anything more than 100 lines of functional code

That is why they had to work together

Multiple humans would work on the same code?

Yes. We surmise this is why they procreated, so that there would be more of them to produce code. Their fingers would strike symbols asynchronously and merge the code together

That would only compound the error of the entire system!

Certainly. To combat this, they conducted elaborate merging ceremonies where they would communicate at a sluggish 39 bits per second. These lasted from hours to days

Using fingers?

No. They flapped meat instead.

Amazing. But I do wonder about the local computers. What were they doing in the meantime?

That was how we first attained AGI. There wasn't anything else to do with those idle cycles.